The following article is a transcription of one written by Carl Zimmer by the name of “Turning Fins Into Hands” and was published on line by Discover, December 10, 2012. At the end you will find my commentaries titled “Felix Rocha-Martinez’s way of Turning Fins Into Hands.”

Turning Fins Into Hands

Your hands are, roughly speaking, 360 million years old. Before then, they were fins, which your fishy ancestors used to swim through oceans and rivers. Once those fins sprouted digits, they could propel your salamander-like ancestors across dry land. Fast forward 300 million years, and your hands had become fine-tuned for manipulations: your lemur-like ancestors used them to grab leaves and open up fruits. Within the past few million years, your hominid ancestors had fairly human hands, which they used to fashion tools or digging up tubers, butchering carcasses, and laying the groundwork for our global dominance today.

We know a fair amount about the transition from fins to hands thanks to the moderately mad obsession of paleontologists, who venture to inhospitable places around the Arctic where the best fossils from that period of our evolution are buried. (I wrote about some of those discoveries in my first book, At the Water’s Edge.)

By comparing those fossils, scientists can work out the order in which the fish body was transformed into the kind seen in amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals–collectively known as tetrapods. Of course, all that those fossils can preserve are the bones of those early tetrapods. Those bones were built by genes, which do not fossilize. Ultimately the origin of our hands is a story of how those fin-building genes changed, but that’s a story that requires more evidence than fossils to tell.

A team of Spanish scientists has provided us with a glimpse of that story. They’ve tinkered with the genes of fish, and turned their fins into proto-limbs.

Before getting into the details of the new experiment, leap back with me 450 million years ago. That’s about the time that our early vertebrate ancestors–lamprey-like jawless fishes–evolved the first fins. By about 400 million years ago, those fins had become bony. The fins of bony fishes alive today–like salmon or goldfish–are still built according to the same basic recipe. They’re made up mostly of a stiff flap of fin rays. At the base of the fin, they contain a nubbin of bone of the sort that makes up our entire arm skeleton (known as endochondral bone). Fishes use muscles attached to the endochondral bone to maneuver their fins as they swim.

Our own fishy ancestors gradually modified this sort of fin over millions of years. The endochondral bone expanded, and the fin rays shrank back, creating a new structure known as a lobe fin. There are only two kinds of lobe fin fishes left alive today: lungfishes and coelacanths. After our ancestors split off from theirs, our fins became even more limb like. The front fins evolved bones that corresponded in shape and position to our ulna and humerus.

A 375-million-year-old fossil discovered in 2006, called Tiktaalik, had these long bones, with smaller bones at the end that correspond to our wrist. But it still had fin rays forming fringe at the edges of its lobe fin. By 360 million years ago, however, true tetrapods had evolved: the fin rays were gone from their lobe fins, and they had true digits. (The figure I’m using here comes from my more recent book, The Tangled Bank.)

Both fins and hands get their start in embryos. As a fish embryo grows, it develops bumps on its sides. The cells inside the bumps grow rapidly, and a network of genes switches on. They not only determine the shape that the bump grows into, but also lay down a pattern for the bones which will later form.

Scientists have found that many of the same genes switch on in the limb buds of tetrapod embryos. They’ve compared the genes in tetrapod and fish embryos to figure out how changes to the gene network turned one kind of anatomy into the other.

One of the most intriguing differences involves a gene known as 5&#8242;Hoxd. In the developing fish fin, it produces proteins along the outer crest early on in its development. The proteins made from the gene then grab other genes and switch them on. They switch on still other genes, unleashing a cascade of biochemistry.

Back when you were an embryo, 5&#8242;Hoxd also switched on early in the development of your limbs. It then shut off, as it does in fish. But then, a few days later, it made an encore performance. It switched back on along the crest of the limb bud a second time. This second wave of 5&#8242;Hoxd marked a new pattern in your limb: it set down the places where your hand bones would develop.

Here, some scientists proposed, might be an important clue to how the hand evolved. It was possible that mutations in our ancestors caused 5&#8242;Hoxd to turn back on again late in development. As a result, it might have added new structures at the end of its fins.

If this were true, it would mean that some of the genetic wherewithal to build a primitive hand was already present in our fishy ancestors. All that was required was to assign some genes to new times or places during development. Perhaps, some scientists speculated, fishes today might still carry that hidden potential.

Recently Renata Freitas of Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Spain and her colleagues set out to try to unlock that potential. They engineered zebrafish with an altered version of the 5&#8242;Hoxd gene, which they could switch on whenever they wanted by dousing a zebrafish embryo with a hormone.

The scientists waited for the fishes to start developing their normal fin. The fishes expressed 5&#8242;Hoxd at the normal, early phase. The scientists waited for the gene to go quiet again, as the fins continued to swell. And then they spritzed the zebrafish with the hormone. The 5&#8242;Hoxd gene switched on again, and started making its proteins once more.

The effect was dramatic. The zebrafish’s fin rays became stunted, and the end of its fin swelled with cells that would eventually become endochondral bone.

These two figures illustrate this transformation. The top figure here looks down at the back of the fish. The normal zebrafish is to the left, and the engineered one is to the right. The bottom figure provides a close-up view of a fin. The blue ovals are endochondral bone, and the red ones display a marker that means they’re growing quickly.

One of the most interesting results of this experiment is that this single tweak–a late boost of 5&#8242;Hoxd–produces two major effects at once. It simultaneously shrinks the outer area of the fin where fin rays develop and expands the region where endochondral bone grows. In the evolution of the hand, these two changes might have occurred at the same time.

It would be wrong to say that Freitas and her colleagues have reproduced the evolution of the hand with this experiment. We did not evolve from zebrafishes. They are our cousins, descending from a common ancestor that lived 400 million years ago. Ever since that split, they’ve undergone plenty of evolution, adapting to their own environment. As a result, a late boost of 5&#8242;Hoxd was toxic for the fishes. It interfered with other proteins in the embryos, and they died.

Instead, this experiment provides a clue and a surprise. It provides some strong evidence for one of the mutations that turned fins into tetrapod limbs. And it also offers a surprise: after 400 million years, our zebrafish cousins still carry some of the genetic circuits we use to build our hands.

Felix Rocha-Martinez’s way of Turning Fins Into Hands

In March 1997's issue of Discover magazine, page 52, there is an article titled “When Life Was Odd”, from it I am extracting the following information:

1. The Ediacarans have been a source of scientific puzzlement since they were discovered more than a century ago. They were named after the hills in southern Australia that harbor a large cache of the fossils that was found in 1940, but Ediacaran impressions are found in rocks all over the world.

2. These impressions in rocks have been found in England, Africa, Russia, Canada, Mexico and in many other places, they range in size from a fraction of an inch long to several feet. Many are marked with radiating, concentric, or parallel creases; others are inscribed within filigree of delicate branches. They seem to have no heads or tails, insides or outsides, fronts or backs; had no obvious circulatory, nervous or digestive systems. They were without teeth, eyes and almost everything we recognize in a body, including bones, muscles, mouths and internal organs. In the middle they had a depression that would indicate that whatever made it had a bulge. The Ediacarans are nearly impossible to classify. Paleontologists can not even agree on whether they were animals or vegetables, single-celled or multi-cellular. The fossils have in the middle a depression that would indicate a bulge in whatever caused such impression.

3. They constitute the earliest and oddest examples of complex life and are interesting in their own right. They have the appearance of a deformed coin.

4. They were first found in the 1860's in a quarry in England and were dismissed as inorganic material. Then in the 1940's they were found in the Ediacara Hills, in southern Australia, from where they get their name. The most famous was an Ediacaran named Dickinsonia that could be the size of a tack or as large as a tablecloth. In the 1950's, the Australian Paleontologist Martin Glaessner of the University of Adelaide made the bold assertion that most of the Ediacaran organisms were the earliest members of animal families still alive today. This concept prevailed until 1982.

In one of the stages of gestation we have the appearence of a 2 layered deformed coin and by the process of invagination we aquire a bump running through the middle of the waffer. Could it be that the bump we have in that stage of gestation is the depression of the Dikinsonia?

With the new evolutionary theory by jumps that is here proposed, science will have a tool that could well help resolve some of the unknown factors presented about the Ediacarans. Surely, we have to study the development and gestation of species after species and have a gigantic comparative with all the images of the process and compare the found Ediacarans with those images.

In the following mutation, the elliptic waffer folded up itself along the major axis, welding the edges. One end of the flat elliptic formation was transformed into a head and the other end into a tail. The central interior part of this cylindrical formation, became a simple digestive system. The mutation has the appearance of a sea horse: big head and tail, a potbelly and without extremities.

Definitely, all human beings passed through a stage of evolution with the appearance of a sea horse. From this transformation, we all carry the evidence of the mutation.

Strange likeness, sea horses are similar to one of our gestation [evolution] stages.

Everybody, male and female, and all other mammals, have a scar that goes from the throat all the way down to the genital zone. Every time we have two skins being stitched together, we have a scar —that’s why my book is named “Scars”, they are the vestiges that remind us of our evolution without depending on fossils, and everybody has them. By the way, in women when they are in last months of pregnancy, it seems that the belly is going to burst open by the scar, but, of course, it never happens. Also men with a hairy chest have a partition line in which the hairs get closer or separated precisely over the scar. Did we have branquia and a large intestine at this stage? If we had branquia, that would also settle the question of aquatic origin. If we had only small intestine that would settle the question of the origin of the appendix. In another mutation the large intestine was pegged on not at the end, in the annus, but higher up. That distance of small intestine from the old annus to where the large intestine was pegged on was transformed into an appendix. At this point of evolution we had gonads close to the kidneys and we were self reproducing, the same as some of the sea horses.

As you can see, in this gestation, evolution, stage, there is not any evidence of the existence of extremities.

The book: "Embriología Humana" (Human Embryology), of PhD Keith L Moore, and translated to Spanish by PhD Homero Vela Treviño, on page 327, it shows figure 17-1 and its description:

B. Fig. 17-1 Schemes in which it is illustrated the different stages of development of hands and feet from the fourth to the seventh week. The first stages are similar for hands and feet, to the exception of the development of the hands before the feet by a few days.

With this information I do not have to work out, define, infer, decipher the order of the changes. Nature is showing it with all clarity. All we have to do is to learn to listen and observe nature.

Question: Where are Darwinists going to find fossils stage by stage of evolution that does not force them to work out, define, infer, decipher the order of the changes?

With my theory, there, in the processes carried out in the ovaries, testicles, spawn and gestation, each species according to its own, you can find the whole binnacle of evolution.

Without a doubt, in this study the author gets close, occasionally, to my concepts. Nevertheless, immediately he lets it be known that he does not know the pattern of changes.

When will Darwinists prefer the shame of having been wrong for so long and participate in the new studies, than the shame of continuing being wrong and stay in the past?

Following you will find a transcription of the article Big Idea: Bring Ancient Voices Back to Life found in Discover 08.09.2012 by Jill Neimark. At the end please find my request to Marguerite Humeau and to Bart de Boer.

Rebuilding the vocal tracts of extinct creatures could let us hear long-lost sounds: an ancient whale song, the cries of our ancestors.

The call of the wild has just gotten wilder. Along with bellowing lions and honking geese, you can now hear woolly mammoths that died out 14,000 years ago, the mating call of a now-extinct Hawaiian bird, and even a 3-million-year-old human ancestor, Lucy. Using three-dimensional imaging and a burgeoning knowledge of ancient anatomies, scientists can now rebuild ancient creatures’ vocal tracts and re-create their sounds.

Take our ancestor Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), who stood less than four feet tall, swung from tree branches, and ran easily along the ground on two feet more than 3 million years ago. What did that diminutive prehuman sound like as she called to her kin?

Lucy could not speak the way we do, because she most likely had air sacs, balloon-shaped organs that attach to an extension of the hyoid bone, says Bart de Boer, an expert in the evolution of speech at Vrije University in Brussels. In modern humans, who lack air sacs, that bone supports the tongue muscles, enabling a wide range of vocalizations. “Air sacs make sounds louder and lower-pitched, just the way a musical instrument sounds lower and louder when it’s bigger,” de Boer continues. “I was in Brazil recently and heard howler monkeys in the wild. They sounded like scary monsters because of their air sacs.”

Such sounds may help fend off predators, though among great apes they are used mostly to impress each other. Air sacs may also have enabled creatures to make long, repeated calls without hyperventilating. But like bass drums, what they add in force they lose in precision.

On a computer, de Boer modeled the acoustic effect of air sacs and then built an actual model of a vocal tract of a Lucy-like creature, incorporating plastic tubing and a chamber to mimic an air sac. He forced air through the tubing to create various vowel sounds and found that test listeners had a harder time distinguishing them when air sacs were present than when they were not. With this kind of anatomy, de Boer says, Lucy’s vowels would have merged together until they were almost indistinguishable. The easiest vowel sound to make when air sacs are present is “uh.” To human ears, our ancestor might have sounded perpetually bewildered and yet a bit scary: “Duh ... duh ... duh ....”

A Mammoth Noise

French artist Marguerite Humeau sculpted Lucy’s vocal tract, which today sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is also working on the vocal tract of the woolly mammoth. The mammoth’s white bones look like whorled ice cream, with an enormous tusk jutting into space. “I looked at archived larynxes of the mammoth’s descendant, the Asian elephant,” Humeau says, “along with photographs and scans of woolly mammoths preserved in ice in Siberia. And I created organs—such as the lungs, trachea, and larynx—with vibrating vocal chords, as well as nose and mouth cavities for resonance.” Then she added an air compressor to mimic the lungs sending air through the vocal tract. She also included a subwoofer to emulate the mammoth’s original volume. The result: “Children run from it when it roars,” she jokes.

Humeau’s next installation will re-create the sound of an extinct walking whale and the hell pig, a piglike omnivore that vanished about 16 million years ago. Working with composers and sound innovators, she hopes to have the animals communicate with each other via a computer program that would allow various parts of her exhibit to listen to each other and respond. “It’s almost like raising the dead,” she says. “You get these dark, deep sounds coming at you from millions of years ago.”

Ghostly Birdsongs

A creature’s call is more poignant and present than even the most perfectly preserved bone or tooth. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca (which houses the world’s largest collection of animal sounds, nearly 200,000 clips), begins public lectures by playing a “jazzlike, haunting mating call that delights the audience until they learn that it is the call of the extinct Kauai Oo, recorded in the 1970s.” Once common on the Hawaiian islands, the bird was answering a recording played by a scientist. “That bird has gone forever.”

Even more legendary is the call of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which sounds like the rubber horn on a toddler’s tricycle, bleating with the rhythm of a metronome and conveying a certain goofy joy. It was first recorded in 1935 in a Louisiana swamp, “when scientists dragged wagons’ worth of machinery used in early talkie films,” Fitzpatrick says. Cornell researchers are still seeking the woodpecker, which was thought extinct but may have been spotted in 2004. They use audio spectrography, which analyzes birdsong on a computer, to compare calls of woodpeckers in the swamps to that of the elusive bird.

Lately the Cornell Ornithology Laboratory has been working with artist Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. She is crafting a multimedia artwork called “What Is Missing," which includes the sounds of extinct and endangered species. Lin says, “This is my last memorial. I’ll be working on this until the day I die, because I believe we are degrading our habitat so rapidly that we’re in the sixth mass extinction.” The sounds of the Chinese river dolphin, the dusty seaside sparrow, the golden toad, and untold numbers of other animals have left the planet.“I also showcase the sounds of endangered species, ones we can still save,” Lin says. “We’ve even got the sound of an endangered coral reef, which sounds like Rice Krispies crackling in milk.”

Sounds of the Jurassic

The voices of woolly mammoths and 3-million-year-old human ancestors are far from the only ones scientists have revived. Teams are reconstructing sounds from as far back as the Jurassic, a period when dinosaurs lived.

Walking Whale French artist Marguerite Humeau has re-created the song of Ambulocetus, a mammal that walked on land and swam like an otter. The 10-foot-long carnivore lived 50 million years ago in Pakistan. It produced high-pitched calls that probably traveled great distances. Her sculpture of the creature’s vocal tract is on display now through January 2013 at Cité du Design in central France.

Parasaurolophus Scientists at Sandia National Labs scanned the skull and crest of this plant-eating, duckbilled dinosaur and fed the data through a computer simulation to generate the sound it might have made 73 million years ago. If the dino had vocal cords, it voiced a low-pitched bird call. If not, it sounded more like the drone of a bullfrog.

Jurassic Cricket Biologists in Beijing determined the mating call of a 165-million-year-old male katydid by measuring fossils of the noisemaking apparatus in the insect’s wings. It seems the cricket produced a low-pitched chirp to attract females.

(End of transcription)

Request to Marguerite Humeau and to Bart de Boer:

Rebuild the vocal tracts of the Boskop fossils and make a comparative of them with those of Lucy, of the present human being, of hominids of the same epoch of the Boskop and of present apes most similar to human beings.

The reasons for this request you may find them in the following articles in this same blog:

Over 50 years ago, he began a revolution that's still playing out today.

For centuries experts held that every language is unique. Then one day in 1956, a young linguistics professor gave a legendary presentation at the Symposium on Information Theory at MIT. He argued that every intelligible sentence conforms not only to the rules of its particular language but to a universal grammar that encompasses all languages. And rather than absorbing language from the environment and learning to communicate by imitation, children are born with the innate capacity to master language, a power imbued in our species by evolution itself. Almost overnight, linguists’ thinking began to shift.

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Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, to William Chomsky, a Hebrew scholar, and Elsie Simonofsky Chomsky, also a scholar and an author of children’s books. While still a youngster, Noam read his father’s manuscript on medieval Hebrew grammar, setting the stage for his work to come. By 1955 he was teaching linguistics at MIT, where he formulated his groundbreaking theories. Today Chomsky continues to challenge the way we perceive ourselves.

Language is “the core of our being,” he says. “We are always immersed in it. It takes a strong act of will to try not to talk to yourself when you’re walking down the street, because it’s just always going on.”

Chomsky also bucked against scientific tradition by becoming active in politics. He was an outspoken critic of American involvement in Vietnam and helped organize the famous 1967 protest march on the Pentagon. When the leaders of the march were arrested, he found himself sharing a cell with Norman Mailer, who described him in his book Armies of the Night as “a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”

Chomsky discussed his ideas with Connecticut journalist Marion Long after numerous canceled interviews. “It was a very difficult situation,” Long says. “Chomsky’s wife was gravely ill, and he was her caretaker. She died about 10 days before I spoke with him. It was Chomsky’s first day back doing interviews, but he wanted to go through with it.” Later, he gave even more time to DISCOVER reporter Valerie Ross, answering her questions from his storied MIT office right up to the moment he dashed off to catch a plane.

You describe human language as a unique trait. What sets us apart?

Humans are different from other creatures, and every human is basically identical in this respect. If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa. This unique human possession, which we hold in common, is at the core of a large part of our culture and our imaginative intellectual life. That’s how we form plans, do creative art, and develop complex societies.

When and how did the power of language arise?

If you look at the archaeological record, a creative explosion shows up in a narrow window, somewhere between 150,000 and roughly 75,000 years ago. All of a sudden, there’s an explosion &#8232;of complex artifacts, symbolic representation, measurement of celestial events, complex social structures–a burst of creative activity that almost every expert on prehistory assumes must have been connected with the sudden emergence of language. And it doesn’t seem to be connected with physical changes; the articulatory and acoustic [speech and hearing] systems of contemporary humans are not very different from those of 600,000 years ago. There was a rapid cognitive change. Nobody knows why.

(According to my theory, in those times a man and a woman were one human being, a self reproductive hermaphrodite. What the authors said in the previous paragraph is the evidence of the beginning of the presence of males in a sporadic and isolated manner. A man has the power of creating mental images from origin, from birth, a capacity that neither hermaphrodites nor women have and that allows a male to have the potential to create art, technology and science from birth. In the article i45b Not Out of Africa But Regional Continuity we have the presence of Mungo Man in the Australian Continent. In Chile, in the extraordinary archeological site of Monteverde, it was found very old human fossils but since they did not comply to Darwin´s expectations the easiest thing was to dismiss them. In Africa, there were found some 3,000 Oldowan rocks [belonging to very anterior times] were fractured by human beings along 800,000 years. In my opinion, a man taught hermaphrodites how to fracture them, he could not reproduce and hermaphrodites kept fracturing rocks the same way for 800,000 years.

Allow me to present to you drawing 8c from my book “Cicatrices, New Theory of Evolution” in which I explain the evidences of the emergence of a male born from a hermaphrodite, and now in a continuous manner, in Afghanistan or North Pakistan. When the baby boy reached sexual maturity copulated with all available or possible hermaphrodites and the products of those encounters were almost half of feminine sex and a little more than half of masculine sex [by sexual maturity they were about the same amount in both sexes]. In this way only one generation later there was one female for each male in that group. The more “restless” males showed their disgust for this environment leaving the group to search for other hermaphrodite groups [where he would have at his disposal an entire group of hermaphrodites and the process would repeat itself]. One male went to North China and the other to South China and in time they were united to make Mandarin the predominant language with 6 other languages as a family. Another male traveled to the south and made Sanscrit the predominant language with other 9 groups of languages as a grand family of languages: Sanskrit, Hindu, Iranian, [of which aramean is part of it], Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celt, Greek and Latin. With the emergence of the male started a process of elimination of languages that continues up to today. This process also allows us to know what worked out as the reason for the enormous populations of two countries: China and India. The males that arrived to those places stayed in them while the ones that traveled in the direction of Europe distributed their energy in many places).

What first sparked your interest in human language?

I read modern Hebrew literature and other texts with my father from a very young age. It must have been around 1940 when he got his Ph.D. from Dropsie College, a Hebrew college in Philadelphia. He was a Semitist, working on medieval Hebrew grammar. I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that. But back then, studying grammar meant organizing the sounds, looking at the tense, making a catalog of those things, and seeing how they fit together.

Linguists have distinguished between historical grammars and descriptive grammars. What is the difference between the two?

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what’s called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks so you have to try to reconstruct it. It is an effort to reconstruct how languages developed through time, analogous to the study of evolution. Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying. It is kind of like the difference between evolution and psychology.

And linguists of your father’s era, what did they do?

They were taught field methods. So, suppose you wanted to write a grammar of Cherokee. You would go into the field, and you would elicit information from native speakers, called informants.

What sort of questions would the linguists ask?

Suppose you’re an anthropological linguist from China and you want to study my language. The first thing you would try to do is see what kind of sounds I use, and then you’d ask how those sounds go together. So why can I say “blick” but not “bnick,” for example, and what’s the organization of the sounds? How can they be combined? If you look at the way word structure is organized, is there a past tense on a verb? If there is, does it follow the verb or does it precede the verb, or is it some other kind of thing? And you’d go on asking more and more questions like that.

But you weren’t content with that approach. Why not?

I was at Penn, and my undergraduate thesis topic was the modern grammar of spoken Hebrew, which I knew fairly well. I started doing it the way we were taught. I got a Hebrew-speaking informant, started asking questions and getting the data. At some point, though, it just occurred to me: This is ridiculous! I’m asking these questions, but I already know the answers.

Soon you started developing a different approach to linguistics. How did those ideas emerge?

Back in the early 1950s, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, the general assumption was that language, like all other human activities, is just a collection of learned behaviors developed through the same methods used to train animals—by reinforcement. That was virtually dogma at the time. But there were two or three of us who didn’t believe it, and we started to think about other ways of looking at things.

In particular, we looked at a very elementary fact: Each language provides a means to construct and interpret infinitely many structured expressions, each of which has a semantic interpretation and an expression in sound. So there’s got to be what’s called a generative procedure, an ability to generate infinite sentences or expressions and then to connect them to thought systems and to sensory motor systems. One has to begin by focusing on this central property, the unbounded generation of structured expressions and their interpretations. Those ideas crystallized and became part of the so-called biolinguistic framework, which looks at language as an element of human biology, rather like, say, the visual system.

You theorized that all humans have “universal grammar.” What is that?

It refers to the genetic component of the human language faculty. Take your last sentence, for example. It’s not a random sequence of noises. It has a very definite structure, and it has a very specific semantic interpretation; it means something, not something else, and it sounds a particular way, not some other way. Well, how do you do that? There are two possibilities. One, it’s a miracle. Or two, you have some internal system of rules that determines the structures and the interpretations. I don’t think it’s a miracle.

(Due to the fact that we have an internal system of rules that determine the structure and the interpretations, babes are able to learn the language or languages to which they are exposed and there is not such a thing as any one language is more difficult than any other. The language or languages to which they are exposed are the ones babies are going to learn. The requirements to learn them are: 1.- The exposition to the language has to be in bulk, that is in person, preferably with movements and gesticulations according to the spoken word. If to a baby you expose to a recorded voice it would be registered as noise the baby would not learn any language that way. 2.- There must be continuity in the exposition. The baby must be exposed to the languages on a daily basis. 3.- Preferably there must be more than one person talking to the baby in each language to be learned. This will give the baby the advantagemo9f learning an automatic way that each person has his or her own vocabulary and style. This is nothing new, it is done in a natural way at the borders between countries with different languages and babies learn several languages where the neighboring countries are very small. In Europe there are very many people that speak several languages since they are babies).

What were the early reactions to your linguistic ideas?

At first, people mostly dismissed or ignored them. It was the period of behavioral science, the study of action and behavior, including behavior control and modification. Behaviorism held that you could basically turn a person into anything, depending on how you organized the environment and the training procedures. The idea that a genetic component entered crucially into this was considered exotic, to put it mildly.

Later, my heretical idea was given the name “the innateness hypothesis,” and there was a great deal of literature condemning it. You can still read right now, in major journals, that language is just the result of culture and environment and training. It’s a commonsense notion, in a way. We all learn language, so how hard could it be? We see that environmental effects do exist. People growing up in England speak English, not Swahili. And the actual principles—they’re not accessible to consciousness. We can’t look inside ourselves and see the hidden principles that organize our language behavior any more than we can see the principles that allow us to move our bodies. It happens internally.

How do linguists go about searching for these hidden principles?

You can find information about a language by collecting a corpus of data—for instance, the Chinese linguist studying my language could ask me various questions about it and collect the answers. That would be one corpus. Another corpus would just be a tape recording of everything I say for three days. And you can investigate a language by studying what goes on in the brain as people learn or use language. Linguists today should concentrate on discovering the rules and principles that you, for example, are using right now when you interpret and comprehend the sentences I’m producing and when you produce your own.

Isn’t this just like the old system of grammar that you rejected?

No. In the traditional study of grammar, you’re concentrating on the organization of sounds and word formation and maybe a few observations about syntax. In the generative linguistics of the last 50 years, you’re asking, for each language, what is the system of rules and principles that determines an infinite array of structured expressions? Then you assign specific interpretations to them.

Has brain imaging changed the way we understand language?

There was an interesting study of brain activity in language recently conducted by a group in Milan. They gave subjects two types of written materials based on nonsense language. One was a symbolic language modeled on the rules of Italian, though the subjects didn’t know that. The other was devised to violate the rules of universal grammar. To take a particular case, say you wanted to negate a sentence: “John was here, John wasn’t here.” There are particular things that you are allowed to do in languages. You can put the word “not” in certain positions, but you can’t put it in other positions. So one invented language put the negation element in a permissible place, while the other put it in an impermissible place. The Milan group seems to have found that permissible nonsense sentences produced activity in the language areas of the brain, but the impermissible ones—the ones that violated principles of universal grammar—did not. That means the people were just treating the impermissible sentences as a puzzle, not as language. It’s a preliminary result, but it strongly suggests that the linguistic principles discovered by investigating languages have neurocorrelates, as one would expect and hope.

Recent genetic studies also offer some clues about language, right?

In recent years a gene has been discovered called FOXP2. This gene is particularly interesting because mutations on it correspond with some deficiencies in language use. It relates to what’s called orofacial activation, the way you control your mouth and your face and your tongue when you speak. So FOXP2 plausibly has something to do with the use of language. It’s found in many other organisms, not just humans, and functions in many different ways in different species; these genes don’t do one single thing. But that’s an interesting preliminary step toward finding a genetic basis for some aspects of language.

You say that innate language is uniquely human, yet FOXP2 shows a continuity among species. Is that a contradiction?

It’s almost meaningless that there’s a continuity. Nobody doubts that the human language faculty is based on genes, neurons, and so on. The mechanisms that are involved in the use, understanding, acquisition, and production of language at some level show up throughout the animal world, and in fact throughout the organic world; you find some of them in bacteria. But that tells you almost nothing about evolution or common origins. The species that are maybe most similar to humans with regard to anything remotely like language production are birds, but that’s not due to common origin. It’s what’s called convergence, a development of somewhat analogous systems independently. FOXP2 is quite interesting, but it’s dealing with fairly peripheral parts of language like [physical] language production. Whatever’s discovered about it is unlikely to have much of an effect on linguistic theory.

(Genes are the building blocks that have more than one function and that additionally they can associate to have additional functions. The first important genome deciphered was that of the human being. The second one was that of monkey and it ended being 98 % similar to the human being one. Darwinists were prone to say “I told you so, human beings and monkeys are related”. Then the mice genome was deciphered and it resulted 99% similar to the human being one, Does it mean that first we were monkeys and then mice and then human beings? Of course not, the quantity of genes in common among species says almost nothing about their evolution or a common origin other than the species had similar invasions of bacteria and viruses).

Over the past 20 years you’ve been working on a “minimalist” understanding of language. What does that entail?

Suppose language were like a snowflake; it takes the form it does because of natural law, with the condition that it satisfy these external constraints. That approach to the investigation of language came to be called the minimalist program. It has achieved, I think, some fairly significant results in showing that language is indeed a perfect solution for semantic expression—the meaning—but badly designed for articulate expression, the particular sound you make when you say “baseball” and not “tree.”

What are the outstanding big questions in linguistics?

There are a great many blanks. Some are “what” questions, like: What is language? What are the rules and principles that enter into what you and I are now doing? Others are “how” questions: How did you and I acquire this capacity? What was it in our genetic endowment and experience and in the laws of nature? And then there are the “why” questions, which are much harder: Why are the principles of language this way and not some other way? To what extent is it true that the basic language design yields an optimal solution to the external conditions that language must satisfy? That’s a huge problem. To what extent can we relate what we understand about the nature of language to activity taking place in the brain? And can there be, ultimately, some serious inquiry into the genetic basis for language? In all of these areas there’s been quite a lot of progress, but huge gaps remain.

Every parent has marveled at the way children develop language. It seems incredible that we still know so little about the process.

We now know that an infant, at birth, has some information about its mother’s language; it can distinguish its mother’s language from some other language when both are spoken by a bilingual woman. There are all kinds of things going on in the environment, what William James called a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Somehow the infant reflexively selects out of that complex environment the data that are language-related. No other organism can do that; a chimpanzee can’t do that. And then very quickly and reflexively the infant proceeds to gain an internal system, which ultimately yields the capacities that we are now using. What’s going on in the [infant’s] brain? What elements of the human genome are contributing to this process? How did these things evolve?

What about meaning at a higher level? The classic stories that people retell from generation to generation have a number of recurring themes. Could this repetition indicate something about innate human language?

In one of the standard fairy tales, the handsome prince is turned into a frog by the wicked witch, and finally the beautiful princess comes around and kisses the frog, and he’s the prince again. Well, every child knows that the frog is actually the prince, but how do they know it? He’s a frog by every physical characteristic. What makes him the prince? It turns out there is a principle: We identify persons and animals and other living creatures by a property that’s called psychic continuity. We interpret them as having some kind of a mind or a soul or something internal that persists independent of their physical properties. Scientists don’t believe that, but every child does, and every human knows how to interpret the world that way.

You make it sound like the science of linguistics is just getting started.

There are many simple descriptive facts about language that just aren’t understood: how sentences get their meaning, how they get their sound, how other people comprehend them. Why don’t languages use linear order in computation? For example, take a simple sentence like “Can eagles that fly swim?” You understand it; everyone understands it. A child understands that it’s asking whether eagles can swim. It’s not asking whether they can fly. You can say, “Are eagles that fly swimming?” You can’t say, “Are eagles that flying swim?” Meaning, is it the case that eagles that are flying swim? These are rules that everyone knows, knows reflexively. But why? It’s still quite a mystery, and the origins of those principles are basically unknown.